Another issue this presents is that opening a document and typing in a full URL suggests that your text will be plain, when in fact it is autolinked. Re-opening the page after saving and you now have linked text.

This could all be fixed in Parsoid with the following rules:

Label matches URL (and has no annotations)
html: <a href="http://www.google.com">http://www.google.com</a>
wiki: http://www.google.com

Plain text URL with no link annotation
html: http://www.google.com
wiki: <nowiki>http://www.google.com</nowiki>

Label doesn't match URL (already works)
html: <a href="http://www.google.com">http://www.google.co.uk</a>
wiki: [http://www.google.com http://www.google.co.uk]

The case with annotations also already works as expected:
html: http://www.<b>google</b>.com
wiki: http://www.'''google'''.com
(which disables the auto linker)

As Gabriel noted we'll still need to keep mw:ExtLink/Numbered preserved (either via the UI, or by seeing if the label is still '[n]'), but this is essentially a Parsoid issue.

Change 71162 had a related patch set uploaded by GWicke:
Bug 46027: Drop mw:ExtLink/URL

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/71162

Should be fixed once the above patch is merged.

Change 71162 merged by jenkins-bot:
Bug 46027, bug 49484: Drop mw:ExtLink/URL

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/71162

[Parsoid component reorg by merging JS/General and General. See bug 50685 for more information. Filter bugmail on this comment. parsoidreorg20130704]

This case has not yet been implemented yet:

Label matches URL (and has no annotations)
html: <a href="http://www.google.com">http://www.google.com</a>
wiki: http://www.google.com

• delete a 'yet' as you prefer :(

Is this now fixed?

(In reply to comment #9 by jforrester)

Is this now fixed?

Ed: Do you know?

We still require the rel="mw:ExtLink" attribute. This serializes to just 'http://www.google.com':

<a rel="mw:ExtLink" href="http://www.google.com">http://www.google.com</a>

Per discussion on wikitext-l, we'll likely drop the rel requirement in the future, which would make even this work:

<a href="http://www.google.com">http://www.google.com</a>